Visual Studio 2013 ultimate began reporting this error while F5-ing the application; surprisingly the application compiles just fine! It just would not debug which I was able to do a day before!

The imported project “C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Windows Azure Tools\2.3\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets” was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

I searched online but could not find helpful information. I made couple of attempts to fix the issue (reinstalled the Azure Tools for VS 2013) but no use! It kept giving me this error. From the error description it is obvious that the VS is unable to find the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets file.

After a while I realized that I had installed Red Gate’s .NET Daemon and this error could be related to that. Saw the following setting on the .NET Daemon menu – unchecking it allowed me to F5 the application without running into that error!

At least now I knew which software was causing the issue. Unchecking the setting in the daemon isn’t the solution; I had to address the root cause which is the missing Microsoft.WindowsAzure.targets file.

The .NET Daemon was looking for this file under C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Windows Azure Tools\2.3 folder! All I did to resolve the issue was to mimic the folder structure for v12.0 under v10.0.

Questions for the Red Gate team in case they read this post. I may be wrong but this appears to be an issue or perhaps I didn’t install the Daemon correctly. What is the elegant solution that would NOT require me to copy the folders? Perhaps the Daemon should just look at the project it is dealing with to figure out what version of the Azure Tools it is using and look for the .targets file in the respective folder under correct Visual Studio sub-folder (v10.0, v12.0, etc.)?

Edited:

I received the following response from the Red Gate support. Hope it helps.

Hi, sorry you had a problem with Demon.

Msbuild paths have changed in Visual Studio 2013 and this may cause some problems for .NET Demon if you have files that still point to older versions of VS or to the old msbuild path. This error happens when a .nuget package restore file points to the wrong MSBuild tools path. In this case, removing your restore files (particularly Nuget.config and Nuget.targets) from your solution and file system, and then re-enabling package restore should resolve it. Similar errors can occur if you have either the PlatformToolset or VisualStudioVersion properties set to an older version, but changing their values to “v12.0” should help.

Rob Boucher just posted a link to the recently published “Windows Azure Symbols and Icon Set” containing Visio stencil for creating diagrams for system built for Azure and related PNG files! Already loving it.

Recently we installed the latest Windows Updates; one of the updates installed .NET Framework 4.5.1!

After installing the updates, .NET 4.0 Web API project stopped working. Following three errors were reported in the logs generated by the application; this is the same code that was running fine before the updates were installed! Please note that each of the following was a separately reported exception which occurred when the code was trying to open a connection to the database.

System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

System.InvalidOperationException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 0 – The message received was unexpected or badly formatted.) —> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception (0x80004005): The message received was unexpected or badly formatted

Research on Google didn’t help much because different people received these errors in different contexts and the solutions/tips varied from restarting the computer to changing the way we access the database! We didn’t want to touch the code because this application was working moments ago! There has to be something in the Windows Updates that broke the application.

Painstaking review of the Windows Updates which were installed that day couldn’t result in anything important that would help narrow down to a particular update.

Then all of a sudden, the light bulb moment! I remember seeing .NET Framework 4.5.1 in the list of updates Windows wanted to install but it wasn’t in the above list! So where did it go? It was found in the “Add/Remove Programs” area. Before we could uninstall it, we wanted to check whether that is the culprit. Little research on .NET Framework 4.5.1 lead us to the KB2915689 which talks about one of the errors we were getting!

We tried the first workaround by disabling the Sophos Antivirus which had several BSP/LSP installed on the server but no use; the application still threw the same errors.

The second workaround was to uninstall .NET Framework 4.5.1 and we did just that! Please make a note of the following gotchas (originally listed here) before you install or uninstall .NET Framework 4.5.1

The .NET Framework 4.5.1 is an in-place update to the .NET Framework 4.5.

The .NET Framework 4.5 and .NET Framework 4.5.1 replace the .NET Framework 4. When you install these versions on a system that has the .NET Framework 4 installed, the assemblies are replaced.

Uninstalling the .NET Framework 4.5 also removes pre-existing .NET Framework 4 files. If you want to go back to the .NET Framework 4, you must reinstall it and any updates to it. (See Installing the .NET Framework 4.)

In a nutshell, we were able to run the application again by following these steps:

Uninstall the .NET Framework 4.5.1

Install the .NET Framework 4.0

Update the Application Pool for the particular application to use .NET 4.0 (apparently uninstalling 4.5.1 changed it to .NET 2.0)

Recently we had to deal with an issue where a .NET Framework update caused a .NET 4.0 application to stop working. In fact the IIS worker process was crashing! Long story short, we had to figure out which versions of .NET and the respective updates were installed on the server in order to take corrective actions. The following links helped determine the information needed.

Debugging a Cloud Service project in Visual Studio 2013 requires you to run VS under elevated account (such as an Admin). You would receive the following message if you try to Debug the project without running the VS under an elevated account.

This happens because by default the Full Emulator is supposed to run which needs the elevated access.

You can avoid running the VS under elevated account if you change the Cloud Service project’s Emulator setting to “Use Emulator Express” which does not require the VS to run under elevated account. See below.